Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  Tulla, I presumed, was sitting deep within the lumber shed, under the tar-paper roof with her long-curled wood shavings. She could probably hear the melody, but she didn’t run after it. I was lured by the pianist’s concert piece. I climbed the fence around the lilac garden and pressed my face to the windowpanes: a cone of glass-green light in the music room. Inside the cone of electric light two conjuring hands and a snow-white but green-glowing head: Felsner-Imbs at conjured keyboard, with his music. The big hourglass silent and hard at work. The porcelain ballerina also thrusts her horizontal leg, frozen in its arabesque, into the cone of green light. Eddi Amsel and Jenny Brunies huddle mustily on the sofa in the background. Jenny is filling a lemon-yellow dress. Amsel isn’t drawing. A sickly pallor coats the ordinarily healthy and apple-glowing faces of the listeners. Jenny has clasped her ten sausage fingers, which the submarine light has transformed into fleshy algae. Amsel builds his hands into a flat roof under his chin. Several times and with relish Felsner repeats a particularly sad passage—Hail and farewell: lapping of waves, army of clouds, birds in flight, love potion, idyl in the woods, early death—then once again, while far in the rear of the room, on the little lacquered stand, the goldfish quivers in its bowl, he plays the whole soft and gentle piece—weary unto death, transition, serene joy—and listens to the last chord with all ten fingers in green air until the half-hour intermission arranged for the lathe and finishing machine, the buzz saw and band saw all at once is at an end.

  The congealed group in the Imbs music room began to move again: Jenny’s fingers unlocked themselves; Amsel’s finger roof collapsed; Felsner removed his fingers from the cone of green light and only then showed his guests his swallowtails, tattered on the sides and in back. The ill-fated garment passed back and forth and finally came to rest with Amsel.

  And Amsel lifted it up, counted the remaining fabric-covered buttons, tested every rent with parted fingers, demonstrated what a shepherd’s incited fangs can do, and after this instructive Introit, proceeded to the Mass: he ogled through jagged holes, peered through slits, widened burst seams with two malignant fingers, was wind under coattails, finally crawled in, became entirely one with the festive tatter, transubstantiated himself and the cloth, and treated the audience to a performance featuring a disabled swallowtail coat: Amsel looked terrifying; Amsel aroused pity; Amsel the hobbler; Amsel the dodderer; Amsel in the wind and rain, on sheet ice; the merchant on the flying carpet; roc, the fabled bird; the caliph turned stork; the crow, the owl, the woodpecker; the sparrow at its morning bath, behind the horse, with the dog; many sparrows meet, scold each other, take counsel, entertain, and thank the audience for applauding. Then came Amsel’s swallowtail divertimenti: the unleashed grandmother; the ferryman has a toothache; the parson fights the wind; Leo Schugger at the cemetery gate; teachers in playgrounds. But let it not be supposed that all were fat, with the build of a lifeguard. Once inside the coat, he conjured up towering beanpoles and windmills, he was Balderle and Ashmodai, the cross by the wayside, and the evil number efta. A dancing, pathetically withered spook seized the porcelain ballerina, abducted her from the piano, courted her with bat’s wings, ravished her heart-rendingly, made her vanish ruthlessly, as though forever, in Harras-black cloth that grew longer and longer, reappear safe and thank goodness sound, and return to her native piano. Pressed for encores, he wound up with a few more numbers; still in love with his masquerade, he transformed himself, confident of applause, into this and that, and was grateful to our Harras, for his scissors bite had, he thanked Tulla far away in the lumber shed for Tulla had sicked, and Harras had beset, and Felsner-Imbs’ swallowtail coat had released catches deep within Eddi Amsel, unearthed wells, tossed pennies in, and fostered the growth of a whole crop of ideas, which, sowed during Amsel’s childhood, gave promise of a barn-bursting harvest.

  Hardly a moment after Eddi Amsel had unwrapped him self from black cloth viscera, disclosing the easygoing and old-familiar Amsel in the flowing green light of the music room, he neatly folded his equipment, took the half-frightened, half-amused Jenny by her plump little hand, and, carrying away the Imbsian swallowtails, left the pianist and his goldfish.

  Tulla and I

  naturally thought Amsel had carried away the hopelessly tattered garment with the intention of taking it to the tailor’s. But no tailor received work because our Harras had leapt. My allowance was cut in half because my father had to provide a brand-new coat. The carpenter might have exacted the rag in return, perhaps for use in the machine shop—where wiping rags were always needed—but my father paid, exacted nothing, and even apologized, as carpenters tend to apologize, with embarrassed condescension and a clearing of the throat, and Amsel remained the usufructuary of the garment which, though fragmentary, was susceptible of transformation. From then on he ceased to devote his talents exclusively to drawing and watercoloring; from then on, though he had no intention of scaring crows, Eddi Amsel built life-size scarecrows.

  Here it is contended that Eddi Amsel had no special knowledge of birds. Neither was Tulla’s cousin a cynologist nor could Eddi Amsel be termed an ornithologist because of his scarecrows. Just about anybody can distinguish sparrows from swallows, an owl from a woodpecker. Even Eddi Amsel did not believe starlings and magpies to be equally thieving; but as far as he was concerned, robin and bullfinch, titmouse and chaffinch were all indifferently songbirds. He was not up to question games such as “What kind of bird is that?” No one had ever seen him leafing through Brehm’s Life of the Birds. When I once asked him: “Which is bigger, an eagle or a wren?” he dodged the question with a twinkle: “The Angel Gabriel naturally.” But he had a keen eye for sparrows. What no bird expert can do, Amsel could: he was able to distinguish as individuals the members of a crowd bevy congress of sparrows, whom everybody believes to be equally colorless. He took a statistical view of all those who bathed in roof gutters, clamored behind horse-drawn vehicles, and descended on playgrounds after the last bell: in his opinion they were all individualists that had camouflaged themselves as a mass society. And to his eyes blackbirds were never, not even in snow-covered gardens, identically black and yellow-billed.

  Nevertheless Eddie Amsel built no scarecrows to ward off the sparrows and magpies with which he was familiar; he built with no adversary in mind, on formal grounds. At the most he wished to convince a dangerously productive environment of his own productivity.

  Tulla and I

  knew where Eddi Amsel designed and built his scarecrows, though he didn’t call them scarecrows but figures. He had rented a spacious villa on Steffensweg. Amsel’s inheritance was considerable and the ground floor of the villa was said to be paneled in oak. Steffensweg was situated in the southwestern part of the suburb of Langfuhr. Below Jäschkental Forest it branched off from Jäschkentaler Weg and proceeded in the direction of the Almshouse and Orphanage along the grounds of the Langfuhr fire department. One villa after another. A few consulates: the Latvian and the Argentine. French gardens behind wrought-iron fences, none of them wanting for ornament. Boxwoods, yew trees, and red-flowering hawthorn. Expensive English lawns that had to be sprinkled in the summer and in winter lay gratis beneath the snow. Weeping willows and silver firs flanked, overtowered, and shaded the villas. Espaliered fruit gave a good deal of trouble. Fountains required frequent repairs. Gardeners gave notice. The watch-and-ward society provided burglary insurance. Two consuls and the wife of a chocolate manufacturer put in a petition for a fire alarm, which was immediately granted, although the fire department was right behind the Orphanage and its training tower overlooked all the silver firs, promising the ivy on white house fronts and all the many cornices and porticoes that knew Schinkel from hearsay to dispatch two fire brigades, within twenty-seven seconds. At night but few windows were lit up, unless the owner of the Anglas chocolate factory happened to be giving a reception. Footfalls between lampposts could long be heard coming and going. In a word, a quiet genteel neighborhood, where in ten years only two murders and one at
tempted murder had become audible, that is to say, known.

  Soon Walter Matern, who had previously lived in a furnished room in the Old City, on Karpfenseigen, moved into Amsel’s villa, where he occupied two oak-paneled rooms. Sometimes an actress or two lived with him for a week at a time, for he still hadn’t made up his mind to start studying economics. Instead he had found a place among the supers of the Stadttheater on Kohlenmarkt. As a member of a large crowd, as a soldier among soldiers, as one of six candle-bearing servants, as a drunkard among drunken mercenaries, as a grumbler among grumbling peasants, as a masked Venetian, as a mutinous soldier, and as one among six gentlemen who with six ladies had to provide a birthday party in the first act, a garden party in the second act, a funeral in the third act, and a merry reading of the will in the last act with numbers and with a chatting, joking, mourning, and joyfully animated background, Walter Matern, though not yet privileged to utter two consecutive sentences, was acquiring his first experience of the stage. At the same time, having decided to broaden the original foundation of his histrionic gift, his gruesome grinding of the teeth, he took two lessons a week in comedy with Gustav Nord, a comedian of city-wide reputation; for Matern was convinced that a talent for tragedy had come to him with his mother’s milk and that if there were still rough edges, it was only in comedy.

  While two oak-paneled rooms of Amsel’s villa were constrained to hear Walter Matern in the role of Florian Geyer, the third and largest room, oak-paneled like the actor’s, became the witness of Amsel’s working methods. Scantily furnished. Crude meathooks in the solid oak ceiling. Chains on trolleys. Close under the paneling, they were hanging big as life. A similiar principle is observed in miners’ change-houses: air and freedom on the floor; under the ceiling, congestion. Still, there was one piece of furniture, a writing desk, a genuine Renaissance desk. Lying open upon it: the standard work, a work of six hundred pages, a work without equal, a diabolical work, Weininger’s work, the unappreciated overestimated best-selling misunderstood too-well-understood stroke of genius, provided with marginal notes by Amsel’s father and footnotes by Weininger: Sex and Character, Chapter 13, p. 405: “… and perhaps, provisionally speaking, the world-historical significance and enormous achievement of Jewry consists solely in this: in having continually brought the Aryan to consciousness of his self, in having reminded him of himself [“of himself” in bold-face type]. It is for this that the Aryan owes the Jew a debt of gratitude; thanks to him, he knows what to guard against: against Jewishness as a possibility in himself.”

  These and similar sentences, as well as sentences that said the exact opposite or were in themselves paradoxical, Amsel declaimed with a preacher’s pathos to already-finished figures dangling from the oak ceiling and to the many wooden and wire frames that occupied the polished floor and peopled the oak-paneled room with an amorphous yet eagerly debating company: and in the course of an easy informal discussion Eddi Amsel, their knowledgeable, sophistical, always original, objective, when necessary subjective, urbane, omnipresent, never offended Olympian host, explained the true nature of women and Jews: “Must we say with Weininger that women and Jews have no soul or does it suffice to say that this applies only to women or only to Jews, and are the Jews, from an anthropological point of view, for in an empirical sense, the tenets of faith argue to the contrary? The Chosen People, begging your pardon. But, and only for the sake of argument, don’t we often observe Jewish characteristics in rabid anti-Semites: Wagner, for example, although Parsifal will always be incomprehensible to an authentic Jew, and in the same way we can distinguish between Aryan socialism and typically Jewish socialism, for Marx, as we all know, was. That is why women and Jews are equally deficient in Kantian reason, and even Zionism doesn’t. The Jews, you see, prefer movable goods. The same with the English. Exactly, exactly, what are we discussing: the Jew lacks, he is fundamentally, no, not only a foreign body in the state, but. But what can you expect when in the Middle Ages and down to the nineteenth century and again today: the Christians are to blame, begging your pardon. Quite the contrary, my dear girl: see here, you know your Bible, don’t you, well then, what did Jacob do to his dying father? He lied to Isaac ha-ha-ha, and he swindled Esau, if you please, and Laban didn’t come off any better. But such things happen everywhere. Speaking in terms of percentages, the Aryans take the lead in crime and not. Which proves if it proves anything that the Jew has no knowledge either of good or evil, that’s why the Jews lack the very concept of angel, not to mention the Devil. May I call your attention to Belial and the Garden of Eden? Still, I think we can agree that the highest ethical elevation and the profoundest moral degradation are equally unknown to him: hence the few crimes of violence, and the same goes for women, which proves again that he lacks stature in every respect, or can you offhand name a saint who. Very clever! That’s why I say: we’re talking about species, not individuals. Even his proverbial feeling for the family serves only the one purpose of multiplying, that’s right, that’s why they’re such panders: the Jewish pander in antithesis to the aristocrat. But doesn’t Weininger say distinctly that he neither nor, that he has no desire whatever to play into the hands of the mob, neither boycott nor expulsion, after all he was one. But he wasn’t for Zionism either. And when he quotes Chamberlain. After all, he himself says that the parallel with women doesn’t always. But he says both are without a soul. Yes, yes, but only in a platonic sense, so to speak. You forget. I forget nothing, my friend. He states cold facts. For instance: Take your time, with facts anything… A quotation from Lenin, eh? You see what I mean? Look here. Darwinism found most of its supporters, because the ape theory: so it’s no accident if chemistry is still in the hands, like the Arabs in the past, a related race after all, hence the purely chemical tendency in medicine, whereas naturopathy, in the end it all boils down to the question of the organic and the inorganic as such: it was not without reason that Goethe identified the effort to make a homunculus not with Faust but with Wagner his famulus, because Wagner, it is safe to assume, represents the typically Jewish element, whereas Faust: because one thing is certain, they are without genius of any kind. What about Spinoza? You’ve taken the word out of my mouth. Because if he hadn’t been Goethe’s favorite author. Not to mention Heine. The same with the English who also haven’t, because if I’m not mistaken Swift and Sterne were. And about Shakespeare we’re still insufficiently informed. Able empiricists. Yes, I agree, practical politicians, psychologists, but never. Just the same there’s—no, no, let me have my say, my dear, I’m referring to English humor, which the Jew will never, but at the very most clever mockery, exactly like women, but humor? Never! And I’ll tell you why, because they believe in nothing, because they are nothing and for that very reason they can become anything they please, because with their inclination for abstraction, hence jurisprudence, and because to them nothing, absolutely nothing is inviolable or sacred, because they drag everything into the, because they refuse to respect either a Christian’s Christianity or a Jew’s baptism, because they are utterly without piety or any true enthusiasm, because they can neither search nor doubt, I’m speaking of authentic doubt, because they are irreligious, because they are neither sunlike nor demonic, because they are neither fearful nor brave, because they are unheroic and never anything but ironic, because like Heine, because they have no ground under their feet, because all they can do is undermine, yes, that they can do all right and never, because they don’t even despair, because they are not creative, because they have no song, because they never identify themselves with any cause or idea, because they lack simplicity, shame, dignity, awe, because they never experience wonderment or shattering emotion, only the material side, because they are without honor or profound erotic impulse, because grace, love, humor, yes, that’s right, humor I say, and grace and honor and song and faith, the oak tree, the Siegfried motif, the trumpet, and spontaneous being, I say, are forever beyond their grasp, yes, grasp, let me finish: grasp grasp!”

  Thereupon Ed
di Amsel detaches himself nimbly from the genuine Renaissance writing desk, but nevertheless, as the cocktail party amid the oak paneling turns to other topics, such as the Olympiad and its side effects, does not close Otto Weininger’s standard work. He merely takes his distance and appraises the figures which, though possessed of only a framework existence, swagger and express opinions all the same. He reaches behind him into boxes, but not haphazardly, grasps, rejects, selects, and begins to dress up the motley company on the floor in very much the same way as he has done with the company hanging on chains and meathooks under the oak ceiling. Eddi Amsel covers them with old newspapers and vestiges of wallpaper obtained from renovated apartments. Discarded scraps of banners formerly be longing to the seaside resort fleet, rolls of toilet paper, empty tin cans, bicycle spokes, lamp shades, cast-off notions, and Christmas tree decorations set the style. With an ample pot of paste, with motheaten odds and ends picked up at auctions or simply picked up, he performs magic. But it has to be admitted that for all their aesthetic harmony, for all their refinement of detail and morbid elegance of line, these scarecrows or, as Amsel said, figures, were less impressive than the scarecrows which Eddi Amsel the village schoolboy seems to have built for many years in his native Schiewenhorst, exhibited on the Vistula dikes, and sold at a profit.

  Amsel was the first to notice this loss of substance. Later, when Walter Matern left his own oak paneling and his pocket-sized paperbacks of dramatic works, he too, though remarking on Amsel’s amazing talent, called attention to the undeniable absence of the old creative fury.